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Ponte Vedra High graduate fights through adversity

Kyle Batton looks challenges in the eye, grits his teeth and pushes right through them.

Batton, 17, a Ponte Vedra High School senior, was born with issues in his left eye, and in his junior year his retina detached after he collided with another player in a soccer match.

Batton, Ponte Vedra's varsity soccer team co-captain, finished the game and didn't notice something was wrong until he went home, he said.

"I was watching TV and I could only see half the screen," he said. "Half my field of vision was missing. I knew something was wrong."

He had his mother, Barbara McComb, a Mayo Clinic physician, look at it, and she knew it was serious, she said. She took him to Mayo Clinic that night.

Batton then had surgery to reattach his retina, afterward spending a week in bed to ensure the procedure worked.

"I had to lay in bed for 12 hours a day on my left side," Batton said. "The doctor told me, 'No one is going to make you stay in bed. But the more you lay down the better chance you have for your retina to reattach.' I laid there forever to get it to work. That was all I could do."

But at the week's end, the doctor told him it was unsuccessful. Batton tried the surgery once more, and once again stayed in bed.

"The second surgery worked, but I still had to stay in bed for about four weeks," he said.

During that time, his school advised him to drop his AP, Advanced Placement, classes. That wasn't an option for Batton.

"Your junior year classes are really important for getting into colleges," he said. "Whatever challenge I had to face I was going to face it. I wasn't going to throw away my education because of my eye surgery."

So, for a month, without being able to see or write or leave his bed, Batton took on his classes. He said his school was a "tremendous" help. His Spanish teacher came to his house three times a week and orally quizzed Batton. His other teachers recorded their daily lectures for him and the school's media specialist brought the recordings to his house. She also downloaded his textbooks into a program that read them aloud.

"The computerized voice read everything syllable by syllable," he said. "It was very hard to understand. When I first I heard it I thought, 'I don't know if this is going to work.'"

Batton was also in extreme pain from the surgery and he was on prescribed medication. He had to wean himself off it because it hindered him from studying.

"I had 60 stitches in my eye and I could feel each one," he said. "It was the worst pain I had felt in my life. My mom would make me take something if she started to hear me yell out in pain."

But Batton laid there and replayed his lectures and textbook readings over and over again until he absorbed the information.

He also recorded himself dictating his homework and his mother would type it up in the evenings, she said.

"He has such drive. He didn't miss a beat," McComb said. "I have a lot of respect for what he was able to do."

Batton passed his AP courses with all A's and B's, and he also passed all of the AP exams, giving him college credit for the courses.

Batton's guidance counselor, Jennifer Ashenfelder, said he is "extremely impressive."

"His work and his resiliency is incredible," she said. "He is mature beyond his years. He can take on whatever he desires."

Batton's good grades helped earn him a spot in Florida State University's Honors Medical Scholars Program. He was one of seven students accepted for the fall, he said. He plans to become a primary-care doctor and open his own practice.

Next week he has an annual eye check-up, but has not any problems with his vision since healing from the surgery.

He said he's ready for whatever comes his way in the future.

"I try not to take no for an answer," he said. "If there's something I feel like would be good for me, I go after it, whether it's a challenge or not, because I can do it. I can't wait to see where that takes me in the future."